Martin Andersen Nexø
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Martin Andersen Nexø (June 26, 1869 - June 1, 1954) was a Danish writer. He is the first author writing about the working class and the first great Danish communist writer.
He was born to a large family in a very poor area of Copenhagen, Denmark. His family moved to Nexø (which he later adopted as a last name), Denmark in 1877. As a young man overcame tuberculosis. After a short career as a worker, he attended a folk high school; later, he worked as a journalist.
In the mid-1890s Martin Andersen Nexø travelled in Southern Europe, and his book Soldage (1903) is largely based on those travels.
As a fine literate, Nexø, like Johannes V. Jensen, was at first much influenced by fin-de-siécle pessimism but gradually he turned to a more extroverted view and joined the Social Democratic movement. From then on, most of his books had a social bias. Probably his best known and most translated book is Pelle Erobreren (Pelle The Conqueror), the last volume of which was completed in 1910. The beginning part of the book was the subject of the movie Pelle Erobreren made in 1987. His other great work was Ditte Menneskebarn (1917-21), a hailing of the working woman and her self-sacrifice as a mother of others. A Danish film version of part I of this book was released in 1946. The much debated Midt i en Jærntid, 1929, (i. e. "In an Iron Age", eng. transl. In God's Land) satirises the Danish farmers of World War I. During his last years he wrote a (never fulfilled) trilogy (Morten hin Røde, Den fortabte generation, Jeanette 1944-56) which was partly a continuation of Pelle the Conqueror, partly a masked autobiography.
Nexø joined the Danish Communist Party though he did not break completely with the Social Democrats until 1933. He always wholeheartedly supported the Soviet Union and this attitude in many ways influenced later generations of left wing writers. As a communist he was jailed in 1941 by the Danish police during Denmark's occupation by the Nazis. Upon release, he went to neutral Sweden. From there he went to the Soviet Union where he did broadcasts to Denmark and Norway (which was also occupied by the Nazis).
After World War II, Nexø moved to Dresden in East Germany, where he was named an honorary citizen. Among other things, the Martin-Andersen-Nexø-Gymnasium High School in Dresden was named after him.
Nexø died in Dresden in 1954 and was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro section of Copenhagen.
In his prime Nexø enjoyed a name of international reputation and until the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe he remained a great name there. Though this position will fade, there is no doubt that he ranks among the great European social writers like Maxim Gorky.
[edit] Nexø Works in English
- Martin Andersen Nexø: Days in the Sun. Transl. by Jacob Wittmer Hartmann. 1929. (travel book)
- Martin Andersen Nexø: In God’s Land. Transl. by Thomas Seltzer. 1933.
- Martin Andersen Nexø: Under the Open Sky. My early Years. Transl. by J. B. C. Watkins. 1938. (part of autobiography)
- Martin Andersen Nexø: Pelle the Conqueror 1-2. Transl. by Jesse Muir and Bernard Miall. Gloucester, Mass. 1963. – New ed. by Fjord Press 1989-.
- Martin Andersen Nexø: Ditte. Gloucester, Mass. 1963.
[edit] Literature
- Henrik Faith Ingwersen and Niels Ingwersen: Quests for a Promised Land. The Works of Martin Andersen Nexø. 1984.
- Henrik Yde: Martin Andersen Nexø. An Introduction. (in: Nordica, vol. 11. 1994).
